BellSouth’s diversity-management
practices, Ackerman says, have affected his personal management style. “I
find myself more proactively seeking
out individuals who have different
thought processes and sometimes
opposing views on a particular issue,”
he says. “I have found that being
inclusive in my decision making
actually leads to more innovation and
stronger results that help to move
BellSouth forward as a
business. At the end of the
day, this is about the company’s business. We are all
here to make our company
successful and that is easier
if everyone is in the house.
Inclusion helps make that
powerful concept a reality.”

Turner Broadcasting,

No. 7 on The 2006

DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for
Diversity list, reached the Top 10 for
the second consecutive year in large
part because of Chairman and CEO
Philip I. Kent. The company has
integrated diversity into every operating unit and relies on Kent and senior
leaders to drive the message through
the organization from the top.

Kent leads Turner’s top-level
diversity council, includes diversity
updates in his quarterly company
communications and made diversity
one of the company’s five guiding
operating principles.

a CEO who clearly gets it, clearly understands that
the world we serve is diverse and our people and our
programming that we use have to reflect that world.”

Kent also interacts directly with employee-resource
groups, which usually are led by senior vice presidents
and which receive financial support from Turner. The
resource groups have to make annual presentations to
Kent and his team to show what they have accomplished
and why they should continue to receive funding.

It’s important for Kent to take such a hands-on
approach, Walker says. “When you’re the CEO and
you’re putting it out there that this is important to me,
[you have] to be a leader in each of those,” she says.

The Top 50 Survey

Without CEO commitment, a company is unlikely to
develop effective and aggressive diversity management.
With that in mind, DiversityInc changed the weighting
of the Top 50 survey’s more than 200 questions this year,
placing the most emphasis on CEO commitment, followed by the other three core areas: human capital, corporate communications and supplier diversity. For the

“Last time I checked, every company was
hiring humans. So if we’re all susceptible to some
biased ways of thinking, our view is we have an
institutional responsibility to challenge people to
thinkdifferently. Chris Sim”mons, PricewaterhouseCoopers

first time, companies in the Top 50 were to have demonstrated consistent strength in each of the components, as
a national diversity leader cannot be inconsistent.

“All of these areas are really strategic levers of diversity
as we see it and they’re all interrelated,” Wiley-Little says.

“Doing poorly in any one eventually impacts the
others that are doing well. It’s important to keep a solid
focus on all of them and, really, it’s about having a
long-term commitment.”

For example, work-force diversity is critical at
Verizon, Yrizarry says, because the company needs to be
able to meet the needs of a diverse group of customers,
some of whom require in-language support or, in the
case of some people with disabilities, special services.

But having a diverse work force isn’t enough.
“Suppliers are critical, too,” Yrizarry says. “We want the
mix to be diverse. That’s sometimes challenging. Not
everyone makes the technology we need, but we push on
our second-tier suppliers. We also think about diversity